Jun 08, 2014

Paddy Power riles Twitter with rainforest prank

It's safe to say the latest blast from Paddy Power's controversial blunderbuss of viral publicity worked better than even the bookmaker could have hoped.

Images tweeted out from the Paddy Power Twitter account appeared to show an area of Amazon rainforest with the words 'C'mon England' shaved into the landscape by loggers. The message was signed 'PP'.

While many people familiar with the dark arts of image manipulation were willing to believe there was more to this than met the eye, there were a great many who believed the bookmaker had genuinely cut down trees in the name of publicity.

The reaction online was strong and very profane. Even actor Dominic Monaghan, who played Merry the Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings movies, waded in:

The Mirrorcovered the story and the Daily Mail described it as an "ecological catastrophe".

To be fair to all those people who fell for it, the images were incredibly convincing, especially once images taken from different angles emerged.

However, while Paddy Power is no stranger to courting controversy surely even they wouldn't really have gone to such lengths just to annoy people on Twitter and get some money-can't-buy publicity on the back of the outraged reaction.

And they didn't.

Paddy Power has published a full explanation of the technical wizardry behind the photos on its blog.

Just in case there are people who still don't believe them, Paddy Power has released a new image showing an entirely different message carved into the rainforest, with accompanying text claiming the stunt was to raise greater awareness of not only Paddy Power (though mainly Paddy Power presumably) but also the very real deforestation taking place in Brazil: